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Tag Archives: appeasement

Why Prologues (Almost) Never Work: After the Party

27 Monday May 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1938, appeasement, back story, book review, Britain, British Union, Cressida Connolly, fascism, historical fiction, literary fiction, Sir Oswald Mosley, storytelling technique

Not Exactly a Review: After the Party, by Cressida Connolly
Pegasus, 2019. 272 pp. $26

Phyllis Forrester enjoys a sheltered life in 1938 Sussex, frightened only of her priggish, domineering husband, Hugh, and her two grasping, manipulative sisters, who live nearby. At a fancy-dress ball, the party of the title, Phyllis fails to protect a friend and suffers for it ever afterward — or so she says.

But the novel really concerns the Forresters’ support for a political movement that preaches “England first,” rejection of foreigners, and nonintervention in the European war that threatens. Students of that era will guess that it’s Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union, but Connolly, a subtle storyteller, doesn’t reveal that identifier right away. I suspect that before she pastes the Fascist label on her characters, she wants you to realize that they’re little different from people everyone has met, if perhaps more selfish or snobbish than most. Likewise, Phyllis’s refusal to examine or even admit to her spouse’s and siblings’ condescension and cruelty toward her evokes her inability to read fascism for what it is.

As political observation, After the Party has much to recommend it, especially the spare yet vivid portrayal of attitudes. As a novel, however, it frustrates me; and because explaining why involves spoilers, I suggest that anyone who plans to read the book should stop here.

The narrative actually begins in 1979, in Phyllis’s internal monologue looking back at the terrible event after the party and her subsequent imprisonment. When I read historical fiction, I like to lose myself in the past, so I avoid novels that feature a parallel, contemporary narrative (this one got in under my radar). But that’s not my beef here.

For those of you who don’t write novels, let me plead for those who do. One of the hardest decisions is where and how to begin, and if you choose wrongly, you can doom your narrative from the get-go. It sounds easy to fix or recognize, but it isn’t; just think of how many novels burden the narrative with too much backstory, too soon. In this case, Connolly’s prologue, which precedes a very long backstory, suggests that the party and Phyllis’s imprisonment are connected. In fact, they occur two years apart, and Phyllis later backs off her belief that she regards her prison time as just punishment for her mistake. Consequently, when you reach the party scene and realize there’s no connection, if you’re like me, you feel a letdown and wonder why the author thought she had to manipulate you with that prologue.

I think Connolly hopes to tie together disparate elements that don’t fit in the order they appear. If she does this to save her description of what makes a Fascist, that’s an idea, a theme, not a story, however interesting or cogent it might be. But two-thirds of the way through the book, after the war starts, Phyllis and Hugh are arrested and interned without trial or even legal counsel for having supported the British Union. That’s a story, especially because one of her sisters, active in the movement far longer, somehow remains free. Should the novel begin there, then? Maybe.

I can’t presume to know whether Connolly fell in love with her backstory and tries to save it through Phyllis’s occasional latter-day observations (which, incidentally, interrupt the forward narrative with privileged information). All I can say is that, as a writer, I’ve messed up enough novels by falling in love with backstory that either doesn’t belong or should go somewhere else. If I’ve learned my lesson, it’s because of the more than three hundred novels I’ve read so as to write in these pages. Many have prologues, yet only once do I recall an instance where that technique works — Andrew Hilleman’s World, Chase Me Down. And he succeeds not because he shows a crime, a high-wire act, a steamy love scene, or a courtroom verdict, teasing the reader with the mystery or romance to come. Rather, within the first lines, he establishes the sense of urgency that all compelling stories have — and if a novel lacks that, it doesn’t matter what the author dangles in your face to keep your interest.

Test this for yourself. The next time you start a novel, see whether you feel connected to the protagonist’s urgency about what makes this moment different, special, even earthshaking. I’m willing to bet that if you don’t feel this within the first five pages, you’re not likely to make it to page 50. And if you do read that far, it’s not because of a prologue.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this commentary appears in a different, shorter form.

Surrendering to Fear: Munich

05 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1938, Adolf Hitler, appeasement, book review, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hermann Göring, historical fiction, historical figures as protagonists, literary fiction, Munich, Neville Chamberlain, Robert Harris

Review: Munich, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2018. 303 pp. $28

Robert Harris has a knack for turning intense historical events into political thrillers, as with An Officer and a Spy (the Dreyfus affair); Aquarius Rising (the destruction of Pompeii); or Dictator (Cicero’s attempt to save the Roman Republic). Harris’s best narratives immerse you so thoroughly that he persuades you to hope that history will unfold less tragically than it does, though you also know that’s impossible. Not only does this make for terrific storytelling, you can see how small moments lead to earth-shattering ones, and therefore how history might have happened differently.

With Munich, about Neville Chamberlain’s pursuit of “peace in our time” in 1938, which dismembered Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s benefit without even consulting the Czechs, Harris hasn’t quite reached those heights. I never for one second doubted that the appeasers would appease, nor did I even dream of them having second thoughts. But I admire Munich nevertheless, as a completely riveting story, with “no — and furthermore” aplenty; a re-creation of an era that leaps off the page; and an ingenious, briskly paced rendering of complex events that somehow doesn’t feel condensed.

With An Officer and a Spy and Dictator, Harris uses historical figures to spearhead his narratives, but in Munich, he can’t. Chamberlain’s cabinet contained only one or two ministers who favored standing up to Hitler, and the prime minister made sure to leave them behind in London. So, without a historical figure to push back and create conflict, Harris invents Hugh Legat, a rising star in the diplomatic corps and a junior private secretary to Chamberlain. Hugh’s growing opposition to appeasement raises the stakes, especially once he gains possession of a state secret that Hitler would kill to protect. Hugh’s opposite number in the German delegation, Paul von Hartmann, is an old friend and former Oxford classmate. He too wishes Britain and France would stand up to the Führer, and belongs to a nascent, disorganized resistance movement that wishes to depose him.

This is why Munich never attains the suspension of disbelief that drives the other novels. We do get a full portrait of Chamberlain in his arrogant stubbornness, dictatorial style, and, to some extent, his vanity, but also his sincere belief that he’s acting in Britain’s interests. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he’s a sympathetic character, because when you see how lonely he is, you also see the snobbery and bigotry that prompt him to push others away. It’s also one thing to swallow a con job by Hermann Göring and believe that the Luftwaffe could raze London in six weeks, and another to reject, out of hand, any evidence or argument to the contrary. Still, when he claims, pathetically, that he’s also done the right thing for Czechoslovakia, you see how much he wants it to be true. But since he’s immovable, the two underlings, Legat and Hartmann, matter more here, except that they stand at the periphery of history, with little or no power to influence it.

Neville Chamberlain holds the paper that he believes will bring permanent peace to Europe, Heston Aerodrome, London, September 30, 1938 (Imperial War Museum, London, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, there are compensations, for the novel revolves around the choices the pair must make and what allegiances they’ll uphold. Hugh’s the more successful characterization – stolid, unspontaneous, but more perceptive than his chiefs, capable of seeing the larger picture and trying to do the right thing in the long run. Yet in his private life, fearful of losing his beautiful, wayward, and mercurial wife, he backs away from confronting her infidelities. Harris never says he’s an appeaser like Chamberlain, but he doesn’t have to, delivering the parallel with a light touch.

Paul von Hartmann’s harder to pin down. He understands Nazism’s mythic power but hates the regime (and, for the longest time, it’s not clear why). Yet he remains a nationalist, a nuance essential to his politics and surely representative, but less clear or convincing on the page. The depth of his former closeness to Hugh (or even that they both attended Oxford) remains a secret from the reader for too long, a lack of authorial generosity that surprises me with this author.

But, as with Hugh, you see Paul’s milieu as clearly as if it were yesterday, and he’s an excellent guide. Typical is this passage about his office mates:

They weren’t such bad fellows, Hartmann thought. He had mixed with their type all his life: patriotic, conservative, clannish. For them, Hitler was like some crude gamekeeper who had mysteriously contrived to take over the running of their family estates: once installed, he had proved an unexpected success, and they had consented to tolerate his occasional bad manners and lapses into violence in return for a quiet life. Now they had discovered they couldn’t get rid of him and they looked as if they were starting to regret it.

If Munich were only a brilliant evocation of the era and its tensions and hopes, the novel would be well worth reading. But it’s more than that, and I heartily recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Johnny on the Spot: Jack 1939

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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appeasement, Francine Mathews, historical fiction, John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Kennedy mystique, Nazism, Reinhard Heydrich, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Jack 1939, by Francine Mathews
Riverhead, 2012. 361 pp. $27

Read solely as a thriller, this improbable page-turner obeys all the conventions. It has a sexy, daring hero, who gets into hair-raising scrapes not even a genie could possibly escape, yet of course, he manages. He beds the most beautiful, passionate woman in Europe, though she’s older, married, and infinitely more worldly than he. And–most importantly–he saves the world to the extent anybody can in the spring and summer of 1939, besting none other than the sociopath Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo (and future architect of the Final Solution).

Aaron Shikler's posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain)

Aaron Shikler’s posthumous official portrait of JFK, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons via White House Historical Association, public domain).

In other words, you could read Jack 1939 and say, “Tell me another.” Or you could lay it down and wonder why you wasted your time on yet another spy novel embodying the clichés that both bedevil and drive the genre.

But you could also read this novel as a fictional biography of John F. Kennedy as a callow, idealistic youth, and as a meticulously researched historical tale of a world destroying itself, with delicious portraits of FDR, J. Edgar Hoover, Churchill, and other leaders thrown in. To the degree that Jack 1939 surpasses the clichés, it does so because the author has thought deeply about her protagonist and drawn a coherent, fascinating portrait of a charming, tortured, sickly, underachieving young man, humiliated by his parents, especially his loathsome father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who never tires of telling him he’ll amount to nothing.

It’s Joe P. who creates the key problem of this novel for FDR, the president who appointed him ambassador to Britain. Kennedy’s an appeaser, an isolationist determined to keep the United States out of any European war. So when Roosevelt wants a fresh pair of eyes to report from Europe, unbeholden to the State Department (or anyone else) he taps young Jack, whose cover is that he plans to interview European politicians for his senior thesis at Harvard. What Jack doesn’t know, at first, is how far his father has gone to deal with the Germans, or how far he’s willing to go, a secret that will shake him to the roots. So Jack faces dangers not only from political enemies but from the worst place of all, his own tortured psyche. It’s a great setup, and in case you needed further trouble, there’s Jack’s undiagnosed Addison’s disease, which has most people figuring he won’t live to see thirty.

But FDR senses that young Kennedy has much more to him than anyone suspects.

Jack might be sick and his record might be checkered, but he was one of those rare souls completely at home in the world. It didn’t matter that he was Irish or Catholic or that his father was regarded as an unprincipled cad; Jack slouched into the most breathless of WASP bastions in his careless clothes and threw his legs over armchairs like he’d owned them from birth. His ease was admired and slavishly imitated; his quips and sarcasm circulated like a kissing disease.

However, once in Europe, Jack quickly learns that his charm and social gifts will get him only so far. They’re particularly useless when it comes to repelling Heydrich’s assassins or rescuing a valuable list of names for which many people have already died or a piece of military hardware that everyone wants. So he must live by his wits and luck, both of which are considerable. But he makes many mistakes, not least for his terrible temper, hooked up like a lightning rod to his sense of injury. I love that stroke, which seems psychologically astute, portraying Jack as oversensitive to slight, just what you’d expect from the child of emotionally abusive parents.

His skirt-chasing doesn’t really satisfy him, because he hates being touched, physically or emotionally. Mathews supposes that he was no great shakes as a Harvard Lothario, “deflowering Radcliffe virgins,” until he meets the gorgeous, brave woman I mentioned above. Nevertheless, Jack’s affectionate and loving with his favorite sibling, his sister, Kathleen (known as Kick for her natural vivacity), and those scenes leave the impression of a very lonely young man dying for the real connection he could never seem to find.

What I find least believable, though, is that FDR would keep a secret radio transmitter by which he and Jack communicate. I’m also none too sure whether Jack’s apple fell that far from his father’s tree. I remember JFK as president, and I’ll never forget the day he was murdered. But I’ve come to reexamine the myths in which I used to believe, including his supposed brilliance at foreign affairs, of which Cuba and Vietnam furnish prime counterexamples.

Nevertheless, Jack 1939 takes place before all that, and it’s intriguing, sometimes poignant, to see the future president struggle with the world as he saw it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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